Final Presentation

Description

Presentations of the projects are given a few days after the Final Demo to an audience of fellow student reviewers, the lab instructors, and occasionally faculty or even students from outside the class who are following up a project of personal interest to them. The style is formal and professional, and students should dress accordingly (Generally business professional, or what you would wear to a career fair).

Requirements and Grading

Each project team has 25 minutes for a Powerpoint presentation and questions. Every group member must present their own work contributing to the project and be ready to answer questions. Presentations are judged on the basis of presentation technique and of technical organization and content.

Presentation technique includes dress, use of display materials (slides), clarity of speech, absence of filler words/fidgeting, proper eye contact with audience and smooth transitions between speakers. Content is judged on use of a proper introduction, orderly and connected development of ideas, absence of unnecessary details, proper pacing to stay within the allotted time, and an adequate summary at the close of the talk. Quantitative results are expected whenever applicable. Here is a general outline to follow:

  1. Introduction to your team and your project.
  2. Objective. What problem are you solving?
  3. Brief review of original design, statement on areas of design that changed, and overview of each functional block's requirements.
  4. Description of project build and functional test results. You can choose to include a short (30s) video of your project here.
  5. Discussion of successes and challenges, as well as explanations of any failed verifications demonstrating and understanding of the engineering reason behind the failure
  6. Conclusions from the project: what did you learn, what would you do differently if you redesigned your project, etc.
  7. Recommendations for further work.

Any significant, relevant ethical issues should be briefly addressed, preferably in a single slide.

Presentations will be graded using the presentation grading rubric. Your slides should follow ECE or College of Engineering presentation theming.

Submission and Deadlines

Slides for your final presentation must be uploaded to your project page on PACE prior to your presentation time. Deadlines for signing up may be found on the Calendar. Sign-up for the final presentation is done through PACE. Remember to sign up for a peer review of another group.

Musical Hand

Ramsey Foote, Thomas MacDonald, Michelle Zhang

Musical Hand

Featured Project

# Musical Hand

Team Members:

- Ramesey Foote (rgfoote2)

- Michelle Zhang (mz32)

- Thomas MacDonald (tcm5)

# Problem

Musical instruments come in all shapes and sizes; however, transporting instruments often involves bulky and heavy cases. Not only can transporting instruments be a hassle, but the initial purchase and maintenance of an instrument can be very expensive. We would like to solve this problem by creating an instrument that is lightweight, compact, and low maintenance.

# Solution

Our project involves a wearable system on the chest and both hands. The left hand will be used to dictate the pitches of three “strings” using relative angles between the palm and fingers. For example, from a flat horizontal hand a small dip in one finger is associated with a low frequency. A greater dip corresponds to a higher frequency pitch. The right hand will modulate the generated sound by adding effects such as vibrato through lateral motion. Finally, the brains of the project will be the central unit, a wearable, chest-mounted subsystem responsible for the audio synthesis and output.

Our solution would provide an instrument that is lightweight and easy to transport. We will be utilizing accelerometers instead of flex sensors to limit wear and tear, which would solve the issue of expensive maintenance typical of more physical synthesis methods.

# Solution Components

The overall solution has three subsystems; a right hand, left hand, and a central unit.

## Subsystem 1 - Left Hand

The left hand subsystem will use four digital accelerometers total: three on the fingers and one on the back of the hand. These sensors will be used to determine the angle between the back of the hand and each of the three fingers (ring, middle, and index) being used for synthesis. Each angle will correspond to an analog signal for pitch with a low frequency corresponding to a completely straight finger and a high frequency corresponding to a completely bent finger. To filter out AC noise, bypass capacitors and possibly resistors will be used when sending the accelerometer signals to the central unit.

## Subsystem 2 - Right Hand

The right subsystem will use one accelerometer to determine the broad movement of the hand. This information will be used to determine how much of a vibrato there is in the output sound. This system will need the accelerometer, bypass capacitors (.1uF), and possibly some resistors if they are needed for the communication scheme used (SPI or I2C).

## Subsystem 3 - Central Unit

The central subsystem utilizes data from the gloves to determine and generate the correct audio. To do this, two microcontrollers from the STM32F3 series will be used. The left and right hand subunits will be connected to the central unit through cabling. One of the microcontrollers will receive information from the sensors on both gloves and use it to calculate the correct frequencies. The other microcontroller uses these frequencies to generate the actual audio. The use of two separate microcontrollers allows for the logic to take longer, accounting for slower human response time, while meeting needs for quicker audio updates. At the output, there will be a second order multiple feedback filter. This will get rid of any switching noise while also allowing us to set a gain. This will be done using an LM358 Op amp along with the necessary resistors and capacitors to generate the filter and gain. This output will then go to an audio jack that will go to a speaker. In addition, bypass capacitors, pull up resistors, pull down resistors, and the necessary programming circuits will be implemented on this board.

# Criterion For Success

The minimum viable product will consist of two wearable gloves and a central unit that will be connected together via cords. The user will be able to adjust three separate notes that will be played simultaneously using the left hand, and will be able to apply a sound effect using the right hand. The output audio should be able to be heard audibly from a speaker.

Project Videos